In 2021, health start care Maven became the first unicorn in the femtech sector and to date has raised more than $300 million from a star-studded roster of investors including Oprah Winfrey, Natalie Portman and Reese Witherspoon. The company provides virtual clinic services for women and families in a wide range of areas such as fertility, maternity and newborn care, pediatrics and menopause, as well as providing financial aid and mental health support. It has more than 15 million lives covered in more than 175 countries.
Maven is end to end. “You can have that continuity of care regardless of your path,” says Kate Ryder, the CEO. “For example, we are currently supporting a woman in London who enrolled in our fertility pathway. She experienced a pregnancy loss about eight weeks into pregnancy and now she is back on our fertility journey and we are helping her with cross-border egg donation between Spain and the UK.
The startup was founded in 2014 by Ryder, then an associate at venture capital firm Index Ventures in London. “I was hovering around digital health at the time and the one thing everyone was trying to crack was patient engagement,” she recalls. “But many of the consumers of these companies at the time were women, and no one was really focused on their health.”
Unfortunately, even today, the data shows that women’s healthcare needs are still largely neglected. Consider that one in five women suffer from postpartum depression but don’t get the mental health care they need, or that four in five women who go to their doctor to talk about menopause don’t get the care they need, according to the UK Department of Health and Social Care.
That’s the gender health gap Ryder wants to close. According to her, Maven offers more than 6,000 appointments each week, with members usually getting an appointment within an hour and having the option to be paired with their favorite experts. Last year, Maven published peer-reviewed studies in the medical journal The Lancet proving the effectiveness of their model: Patients who met with a virtual ob-gyn, for example, saw a 4.2-fold reduction in visits to the ER, while first-time moms who went through Maven’s maternity care programs saw a 27 percent reduction saw in C-section rates. “We went through objective claims analysis to really see if a virtual model affects the results,” says Ryder. “What we see is that the magic happens when we put all the pieces together.”
This article appears in the July/August 2023 edition of WIRED UK magazine.
Updated 8/6/2023 6:00 PM ET: The details of the funding obtained by Maven have been corrected.